“Lay the Favorite” got the coveted Saturday-night centerpiece screening at Sundance this year, a slot meant to showcase a potential box-office hit. If I were any good at forecasting such things I’d have a different job, but at least this movie fits the bill better than the utterly risible “Red Lights,” a hokum-filled supernatural thriller with Robert De Niro, Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver that premiered Friday. Neither movie takes place in anything resembling the real world, but at least Frears doesn’t leave talented actors rattling around with no idea what to do. Indeed, he clearly instructed Hall to shed all inhibition and go for it in her portrayal of Beth Raymer, a real-life Florida stripper turned professional gambler who wrote the memoir on which D.V. DeVincentis’ screenplay is based. (Raymer herself appeared at the post-screening Q&A, and it appears that Hall’s performance is underplayed, if anything.)

I’m in the tank for Rebecca Hall, pretty much, so even though I would agree that she cranks up the sunny, girly, giggly power-of-positive-thinking charm pretty doggone high here, I enjoyed (almost) all of it. Every British actor believes that he or she can play a convincing American, and all too often it just amounts to getting a bad haircut, hitting the R’s really hard and chewing gum. Hall is one of the few who can actually do it, and whether you find Beth irresistible or too damn much, you’ll recognize her right away. Beth quits her job as a private dancer in Tallahassee — those early scenes have more sleazy, funny, Frears-ian edge than the rest of the movie put together — to move out to Las Vegas and become a cocktail waitress. Instead she winds up placing bets and making deliveries for an ex-con named Dink (Willis), a gambler who makes his living trying to outguess the Vegas sports books on football, basketball, baseball, beauty pageants, spelling bees and anything else that involves winning and losing.

Willis is an agreeably growly presence, creeping around Vegas in faded tropical shirts and knee-high white socks — he’s arguably a better actor now that he can’t simply rely on charm and twinkle — but the screenplay calls for Dink and Beth to fall in love, albeit temporarily. Everyone in and around this movie seems understandably skeeved out by that idea, so they (and we) never take it seriously. Their Vegas adventures are recounted with high spirits, bright colors and a moderate amount of laughs, but where Frears was once committed to setting his films in the recognizable here and now, “Lay the Favorite” offers a highly generic, shtick-inflected vision of life in the Vegas gambling economy, and you can feel his attention wandering when it comes to the technical details. He clearly doesn’t know or care about either American sports or gambling, which is no crime — but it might disqualify him from making a movie about a woman with a remarkable head for numbers and a striking ability to outthink the bookies. Steven Soderbergh, for example, could have made a fascinating film out of Beth Raymer’s professional odyssey, but for Frears it amounts to a lot of forced humor and people yelling at each other.

There’s a regrettable performance by Vince Vaughn as a stereotypical New York bookie, involving an exaggerated Jewish accent and bad reggae dancing; an irrelevant one by Catherine Zeta-Jones as Dink’s oft-surgeried wife, whose name is Tulip; and an utterly unnecessary one by Joshua Jackson, as the boyfriend Beth picks up once she leaves Vegas. The last third or so of the film, when Beth first helps run an illegal gambling operation in New York and then an offshore betting shop in Curaçao, is highly perfunctory. Even then Hall is fun to watch, Frears keeps the mood light and cinematographer Michael McDonough keeps the pretty pictures coming. Like I say, at 36,000 feet halfway between Atlanta and Dallas, it’ll be terrific.

Campos is a talented young director who serves as a perfect example of how isolated the indie-film world can be from mainstream pop culture. His stylish, hypnotic debut film, “Afterschool,” set among the technology-addicted denizens of an elite Eastern prep school, made him an immediate brand name among critics, festival programmers and so forth, while attracting very little audience. (I’m not damning with faint praise or anything; I too thought it was terrific.) Then he served as a producer on “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” directed by his friend Sean Durkin. (Those two, along with producer-director Josh Mond, are the principals in the ultra-hip Borderline Films.)

Viewed as the next stage in Campos’ development, and as an exercise in technical virtuosity, “Simon Killer” makes a lot of sense. Shot in long hand-held takes in the streets, bars and apartment buildings of Paris, the film is a mesmerizing sound-and-vision construction, occasionally disintegrating into hallucinogenic strobe effects or music-video interludes. From its first seconds Campos builds an ominous, almost nightmarish atmosphere, plunging us into the world of its title character, a post-collegiate American drifter played by Brady Corbet. Simon has recently had a bad breakup with his long-term girlfriend; he apparently did things that made her frightened (though we don’t exactly know what), and while he’s clearly still in love with her, he can hardly say her name without muttering “whore” or “cunt.”

Corbet gives a powerful and multifaceted performance, playing Simon both as a recognizable and at least halfway sympathetic young guy — egotistical, fiercely romantic, all too willing to drag a girl into a torrid love affair and then cheat on her — and as something much more alien and terrifying. From the first moments we see Simon, chain-smoking, stubbly, clearly unwashed and underslept, it’s clear that the guy is ill. We just don’t know how ill, or in what way. In his effort to forget the perfidious Michelle, Simon takes up with a skinny, biracial hooker who goes by Victoria (the excellent Mati Diop). At first it’s just professional sex — “I’m not your girlfriend, you can say anything to me,” she tells him — but something clicks between them, and when Simon shows up at her apartment after getting beaten up in the street and asks for shelter, she doesn’t say no.

Yeah, this is a love story featuring a whore with a heart of gold, at least in part, and that’s where my ambivalence about “Simon Killer” starts to kick in. This film is very different in approach and style from “Afterschool,” but demonstrates every bit as much command of the technical side of cinema. Every shot, every line of dialogue, every musical cue and every snippet of ambient sound has been considered, and is there for a reason. Corbet and Diop develop a powerful erotic chemistry that makes their characters’ hackneyed situation seem real and vivid, and even renders plausible their ill-considered scheme to blackmail one of Victoria’s johns. For a long time, I was grooving so hard on the experience of watching the film that I shelved my concerns about the story it’s telling, which is a predictable and overly engineered one-way trip to hell.

I definitely shouldn’t issue spoilers on a movie you won’t get to see for months, but let’s see now: There’s the title, first of all. And Campos has made clear that “Simon Killer” was partly inspired by the case of Joran van der Sloot, the principal suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, who was later convicted of murdering a different woman in Peru. Tabloid crime stories are as valid a source as anything else, I suppose. In this case I felt disappointed that a movie with so much sensual sizzle and possibility turns gradually into a grim, deterministic noir with a muddled, indecisive, screw-the-audience conclusion.

If Louiso’s name rings a dim and distant bell in your mind, it may be because of his quasi-legendary supporting performance as a know-it-all record-store clerk in Stephen Frears’ “High Fidelity,” lo, these many years ago. He’s now primarily a director, and on the evidence quite a skilled one. The problem with “Hello I Must Be Going” is that Sarah Koskoff’s screenplay starts out so modestly: You think it’s just going to be a female early-midlife-crisis movie, or an older-woman/younger-guy love story, and, heck, it is both of those things. But to my taste, as the movie goes along it becomes much richer and funnier than that summary suggests, painting a satirical but sympathetic portrait of upper-crust family life in Westport, Conn., a rather toff and beachy New York suburb.

New Zealand actress Melanie Lynskey is terrific as a depressed, 30-something recent divorcee named Amy, who has moved back in with her Westport parents, who simultaneously support and undermine her in all the wrong ways. Her hypercritical mom is Blythe Danner and her willfully blind high-end lawyer dad is John Rubinstein, and each of them is worth the price of admission by themselves. Amy’s life of watching TV and eating cookies is upended by the handsome and thoughtful Jeremy (Christopher Abbott), a fast-rising young actor known for his recent largely-nude performance in a play about Robert Mapplethorpe. Everyone around Jeremy, especially his therapist mom (the hilarious Julie White) assumes he’s gay, but once he’s one-on-one with Amy, that proves to be untrue. Jeremy is arguably much more mature and together than Amy is, but the fact remains that he’s also 19 years old.

Louiso plays out this scenario both sweetly and plausibly, and as I’ve suggested, gets the biggest laughs from the situation late in the game. I’m pretty sure some distributor will eventually take a flyer on “Hello I Must Be Going,” and I only hope they market it tenderly and carefully. The odds are always against an indie drama that lacks big stars or a headline-grabbing hook, but nurtured carefully this one could have relatively wide appeal.

Sundance has ditched its former tradition of having one main opening-night film, instead screening four different pictures, two American (a narrative feature and a documentary) and two foreign (ditto). This is all to the good, and avoids invidious comparisons with more Hollywood-centric festivals — but there’s little doubt this year that photographer-turned-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s documentary “The Queen of Versailles” was first among equals. The unbelievable-but-true story of Florida real-estate tycoon David Siegel and his ex-beauty-queen wife Jackie, who nearly went broke while trying to build the biggest house in the country, is like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. It often had the sold-out Eccles Center howling, but also has elements of profound tragedy and allegory.

After everything starts to go south for the Siegels, Jackie has to take their enormous brood of children — or some of them anyway; I believe they have eight — back to her upstate New York hometown on a commercial flight. (Previously, they had gone everywhere in their private jet, of course.) But she’s still baffled when she gets to the Hertz counter at the airport in Elmira, N.Y., and asks, “Who’s my driver?” She grew up in modest middle-class circumstances and hasn’t been nosebleed-rich for that many years, but she has totally forgotten that regular people don’t have chauffeurs.

And the thing is, I never felt that Greenfield was mocking Jackie, who comes across as a likable, commonsensical middle-aged mom (albeit one with considerable, um, cosmetic enhancements) and is in many respects the heroine of the movie. She really is an ordinary person who has led a life that goes beyond the unlikely or the bizarre to the flat-out impossible. Her previous jobs included cocktail waitress and nursing-home attendant, and here she is pumping out kids and managing a 26,000-square-foot house for a sour and distracted rich guy 30 years older than her. (That’s not the uncompleted house modeled after the Palace of Versailles; that one was supposed to be 90,000 square feet.) By the end of the film, with most of the household staff laid off, Jackie’s job includes wandering around scraping dog crap off the carpeting in room after room, and discovering how many of her children’s pets have died from neglect.

David Siegel, who made his enormous fortune by selling time-share vacation rentals in places like Florida and Las Vegas (and Park City) to working- and middle-class people who couldn’t quite afford them, is apparently suing Greenfield over his portrayal in the film. Specifically, he objects to the Sundance brochure describing “Queen of Versailles” as a “riches-to-rags” story, and while I’m no lawyer, I suspect he’d have a better case if that weren’t exactly how he puts it in the movie. What David really doesn’t like, I suspect, is seeing himself on-screen as a brooding old cuss with no life outside his work and no time for his own children. He shuts himself up in a cluttered den with a widescreen TV and stacks of papers, trying to find a way to rescue both his Orlando dream house and his Vegas condo tower, now deeply underwater. (Time-share lending was essentially a species of subprime mortgage, and when credit dried up so did Siegel’s business.)

Still and all, Greenfield does allow us to see Siegel’s human qualities, especially the fact that he’s chasing the same ersatz vision of luxury, the same unattainable simulacrum of the good life, that he’s been selling to poor people one Vegas weekend at a time. He’ll probably never finish his Versailles, but even if he does it’ll have cockroaches and the same ghastly paintings of his family in pseudo-medieval finery. Siegel and his wife are of course entirely unaware that their attempt to build a replica of Versailles in Florida, and fill it with “Louis XIV-type antique furniture,” is a cruel and altogether too appropriate historical joke. But that’s really not their fault; they live in a country that has become a parody of itself.

Contrary to what you might assume, the indie-film market isn’t doing too badly. While the 2011 festival produced no huge box-office hits or major Oscar contenders, lots of films sold to distributors and a good proportion of those went on to modest success with critics and “specialty audiences” (the industry phrase used to denote art-house and festival attendees in big cities and college towns). Cooper’s opening-night quartet consisted of the Harry Belafonte documentary “Sing Your Song,” the African-American indie “Pariah,” the hilarious Irish cop comedy “The Guard” and James Marsh’s chimp documentary “Project Nim.” Among the festival’s award winners were “Like Crazy,” “Hell and Back Again,” “Buck,” “Circumstance,” “Senna,” “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “Tyrannosaur,” “Another Happy Day,” “If a Tree Falls” and “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.” From a movie-lover’s point of view, that’s not a glass half-full; it’s a brimming cup of fresh-brewed goodness.

Thankfully, the late-night bidding wars that often followed Sundance premieres in the festival’s glory days are a thing of the past. (Most infamously, Focus Features ponied up $10 million for the 2008 Steve Coogan comedy “Hamlet 2,” which slayed crowds at the festival — and then made less than half that amount in general release.) But with the widespread availability and acceptance of video-on-demand — whether on cable, via satellite or through the Internet — smaller films can reach many more people more rapidly than ever before. With the cost of entry-level filmmaking at an all-time low, it’s possible to break even or turn a small profit with a movie most Americans will never even know about. I’ve had more than one indie director tell me that selling VOD rights has enabled them to pay off their actors and technical crew. If the movie then goes on to play a few theaters, that’s pure gravy. Nobody’s getting rich through that model, to be sure, but it allows economical and business-savvy artists to keep doing their work.

Since Sundance’s principal focus remains low- or mid-budget American movies that have just been completed and were made close to the ground, it often offers a kind of weather report on the national mood. This year’s lineup features topical documentaries about the continuing healthcare crisis and the endless, pointless War on Drugs, along with Thursday night’s festival opener, “The Queen of Versailles,” a controversial doc about a real estate developer struggling to complete the country’s largest McMansion. There are also historical films about the growth of the environmental movement and the angry, desperate and highly successful AIDS activism of the ’80s and ’90s. For a festival long associated with low-budget narrative film, in fact, Sundance may be at its best with documentaries. (Very quietly, it’s also become a pretty good showcase for offbeat foreign films.)

This year’s Sundance narrative features skew, if anything, toward genre films, notably thrillers and raunchy comedies. That trend has been brewing for several years, and may reflect the national mood in its own way. Even indie filmgoers, perhaps, have seen enough movies about lovelorn young people who drink too much and make bad decisions. Furthermore, the paying public has largely stayed away from downbeat dramas about unemployment or foreclosure or similar Great Recession topics, for entirely understandable reasons.

I’ve picked 15 movies I’m most excited about seeing in the coming days, but I could easily have pushed the list to 30 or 40. (How am I possibly going to squeeze in “Room 237,” the conspiracy-theory documentary about the hidden messages supposedly encoded in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”? Or the insane-sounding, Web-derived cult horror flick “John Dies at the End”?) And since I’ve only seen a couple of these in advance, I make no guarantees of quality. If this year’s Sundance doesn’t boast the star power of some previous festivals, we’re still talking about a gathering that will bring Kirsten Dunst, Chris Rock, Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Spike Lee, Stephen Frears, Rebecca Hall and a couple of thousand less famous people from all corners of the film industry and cram them together amid the slush and traffic of a ski resort in the middle of January. I complain about Sundance a lot, but it’s a great privilege to get to go. I’ll freeze my fingers and toes and possibly my cellphone, and at some point I’ll probably learn (again) that more than one drink at high altitude is an immensely bad idea. What fun!

2 Days in New York Star and director Julie Delpy is back with a sequel to her zany hit “2 Days in Paris,” this time starring Chris Rock as her new boyfriend, with whom she’s shacked up in Manhattan. At least until a houseful of French relatives and partners (including Delpy’s real-life father) descend upon them, armed with enlightened sexual views — and less enlightened views on race.

Bachelorette Kirsten Dunst heads the cast of boozing, coke-snorting professional women as they celebrate the first of their number — long known as “Pig Face” — to tie the knot. I know writer-director Leslye Headland’s debut feature sounds like a “Bridesmaids” knockoff, but I’m assured that’s not the case.

Detropia Terrific documentary-makers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who brought us “Jesus Camp” and “12th & Delaware,” now visit Detroit, whose rise and fall — and possible rebirth as a city of scavengers, homesteaders and artists — could be the story of industrial-age America in a nutshell.

A Fierce Green Fire Based on the book by New York Times reporter Philip Shabecoff, this ambitious history of the environmental movement from activist filmmaker Mark Kitchell (“Berkeley in the Sixties”) is sure to be a major draw.

How to Survive a Plague A tale of the 1980s AIDS epidemic, and how an angry activist army helped turn the tide. Faced with government indifference, widespread social hostility and a slow-moving medical bureaucracy (not to mention a devastating virus), a self-appointed army of HIV-positive men and women attacked on all fronts in an effort to save their own lives. David France’s documentary takes us back to those heated days, exploring how groups like ACT UP and TAG made medical history.

Keep the Lights On Director Ira Sachs, who made the exquisite Sundance prize-winner “40 Shades of Blue” a few years back, returns with what sounds like this year’s hottest gay-themed film, a ’90s New York romance that follows the tumultuous, chemically enhanced love affair of a documentary filmmaker and a closeted lawyer from beginning to end.

Lay the Favorite British director Stephen Frears has bounced back and forth from London to Hollywood his whole career, but he hasn’t been at Sundance since 1991. Rebecca Hall plays the stripper-waitress who places bets all over Vegas for professional gambler Bruce Willis — at least until his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) puts her foot down. Sounds a lot like a follow-up to Frears’ long-ago hit “The Grifters,” and I imagine he’s thinking that way too.

The Queen of Versailles This reportedly delirious documentary by Lauren Greenfield about a billionaire couple’s quest to build America’s largest house (at 90,000 square feet!) already seemed like a must-see. Then the developer profiled in the film sued Greenfield and the festival, claiming that he was presented as going broke when he hasn’t. What’s that they say about bad publicity?

Red Hook Summer It’s Spike Lee’s first personal, Brooklyn-set film in many years, and while it’s not exactly a sequel to “Do the Right Thing,” he himself is back as the now middle-aged Mookie, once the ambiguous hero (or villain) of that film. A boy from Atlanta is sent to the eponymous Brooklyn neighborhood to live with his fire-and-brimstone preacher grandfather, whom he’s never even met. But we hear the comedy turns explosive halfway through.

Red Lights Perhaps the most obvious would-be commercial hit at this year’s festival features Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver as paranormal researchers out to prove that a legendary blind psychic (Robert De Niro) is a fake. But is he? Elizabeth Olsen and Toby Jones also star for Spanish writer-director Rodrigo Cortés, who’s looking for his big American breakthrough.

Simon Killer Advertised as a neo-noir thriller about an American post-collegiate drifter (Brady Corbet) who falls in love with a Parisian prostitute, this is also the second feature from writer-director Antonio Campos, whose “Afterschool” marked him as the first full-fledged auteur of the post-YouTube era. (I know how obnoxious that sounds, but check it out if you haven’t seen it.)

Tim and Eric’s Billon Dollar Movie You know, I’m not sure that Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s brand of absurdist humor (well known to Adult Swim viewers) is exactly my thing. But there’s no doubt that their debut as film writers, directors and stars — a big corporation gives them a billion smackeroos to make a movie and, shockingly, they blunder it all away — will be one of Sundance’s most madhouse-y events. Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and Zach Galifianakis costar, and I hear other Hollywood luminaries show up for the nutty laffs as well.

West of Memphis Yeah, there’s already been a documentary about the highly dubious murder conviction of the West Memphis 3 — in fact there have been three, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s just-completed “Paradise Lost” trilogy. But writer-director Amy Berg’s new film, which is backed by Peter Jackson and lists recently released WM3 defendant Damien Echols as a producer, reportedly offers new interviews, new background and new theories about what really happened.

Wish You Were Here This year’s entry in the Aussie genre-film sweepstakes is Kieran Darcy-Smith’s reportedly ingenious debut feature starring Joel Edgerton. A young foursome goes on a Cambodian vacation — but only three of them come back and try to resume their normal lives. You just know the secret’s gonna come out somehow!

Your Sister’s Sister Acclaimed Pacific Northwest micro-indie auteur Lynn Shelton ramps up the star power in her follow-up to her 2009 Sundance hit “Humpday.” This likable, lo-fi rom-com brings a depressed drifter (Mark Duplass) to an island cabin with a bottle of tequila and a newly single lesbian (Rosemarie DeWitt) who seems suspiciously interested in him. And then there’s the fact that it’s her sister (Emily Blunt) he really likes.